‘Searching for truth’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, TJ Cooke

My guest this week says he uses music before he sets hands to keyboard, to help conjure the creative mood. Sometimes it works the other way around; he’ll be writing and will realise the mind-jukebox is directing a scene to the structure or lyrics of a song. He trained as a lawyer but quickly found a creative outlet as a legal adviser on TV dramas. From there he began writing some of the UK’s most popular series and is now a crime novelist. Funnily enough, one of his key songs is Jon & Vangelis’s I’ll Find My Way Home, which one of my earliest guests used as a touchstone for his MG novel – isn’t it amazing how one piece of music can inspire such diverse ideas? He is TJ Cooke and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

I find music to be the start and end point of my inspiration when I write. In fact, now I compose music to the scenes I write… I find it enhances tenfold the movement of the part or scene I find myself authoring. An example would be the theme score called “Battle of Titan” I composed for the chapter “Titan’s Grip” from vol 1 of “Worlds of Infinity – Guardians” a sci-fi novel I’m currently working on.

I do the same thing with my writing. Either I hear a song that inspires a scene or I find a scene I am writing reminds me of a song. I cannot write without music. In two of my books, I wrote a song for the book as well, but I did not compose the music. I only wrote the lyrics. Each of my books touch upon some element of music, because I feel if it is important to me, it may be important to my characters. Doesn’t a song on the radio hit a nerve or two in your day to day routines? Well I feel that for my characters this would be true too.

Gosh, JP, another multicreative person. And you’re dead right about randomly heard songs suddenly snatching the mood and making sense of it. When I’m deep in a novel, the story and characters become like my own life and I make some wonderful connections by listening to random tracks on the radio.
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